in the journal Nature Nanotechnology<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe 1 kilobyte memory is the work of a team led by Sander Otte at the Technical University of Delft (TU Delft). With each bit of data represented by the position of a single chlorine atom, the team was able to reach a density of 500 Terabits per square inch.<\/p>\n
“In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp,” said Dr Otte.<\/p>\n
Or, by another measure, the entire contents of the US Library of Congress could be stored in a 0.1mm-wide cube.<\/p>\n
The researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), in which a sharp needle probes the atoms on the surface one by one.<\/p>\n
Sliding puzzle<\/h2>\n
This allowed the researchers to push the atoms around in a manner which Sander Otte compares to a sliding puzzle.<\/p>\n
“Every bit consists of two positions on a surface of copper atoms, and one chlorine atom that we can slide back and forth between these two positions,” he said.<\/p>\n
“If the chlorine atom is in the top position, there is a hole beneath it – we call this a 1. If the hole is in the top position and the chlorine atom is therefore on the bottom, then the bit is a 0.”<\/p>\n
Because the chlorine atoms are surrounded by other chlorine atoms (except near the holes), they keep each other in place.<\/p>\n
For this reason, the team at TU Delft believe their method is much more stable than methods using loose atoms – and more suitable for practical data storage applications.<\/p>\n
As a proof of principle, the team encoded a section of a famous lecture called “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” by the physicist Richard Feynman on an area 100 nanometres wide.<\/p>\n
Future promise<\/h2>\n
However, despite its future promise, the approach is not ready for the real world just yet. Stable information storage could only be demonstrated at a temperature of 77 Kelvin (-196C) and the speed of single write and read processes is still slow – on the scale of minutes.<\/p>\n
However, said Dr Otte, “through this achievement we have certainly come a big step closer”.<\/p>\n
In an article published in the same issue of Nature Nanotechnology, Steven Erwin, from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, acknowledged the current limitations.<\/p>\n
But he added: “It is important to recognise the significance of this accomplishment – a functioning high density atomic-scale memory device that will, at the very least, stimulate our imaginations towards the next such milestone.”<\/p>\n
BBC<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The quest for storage devices that pack more information into a smaller space has reached a new limit, with memory that writes information atom-by-atom. Dutch scientists developed rewritable memory that stores information in the positions of individual chlorine atoms on a copper surface. The information storage density is two to three orders of magnitude beyond […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":43602,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[469],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43596"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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